


Another Day to Find You

by natascha_ronin



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Captain Swan AU Week, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-15
Updated: 2016-07-15
Packaged: 2018-07-24 07:45:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7499886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/natascha_ronin/pseuds/natascha_ronin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>CS AU Week: Day 1. Crossover<br/>A-Ha "Take On Me" Video/ Captain Swan</p>
            </blockquote>





	Another Day to Find You

She’s leaning against her car, nursing a bump on the back of her head. 

The ice pack Graham hands her is cool to the touch, and she doesn’t miss the way his fingertips graze hers in the exchange. His eyes say what his eternal hesitation doesn’t. 

Not that she wants the attention. She’s glad he takes the hint.

“Thanks, sheriff.” Emma breaks eye contact to bend her neck and apply the ice to her head. 

He sighs and looks over to Deputy Nolan, who is guiding the perp into the back of the police cruiser. 

“That was a close call.” 

Emma nods and licks at the inside of her lip, swollen and bruised from where she was knocked to the ground by a fleeing dirtbag who didn’t want to go back to jail. She snorts.

The sheriff gives her a sharp look. “I mean it, Swan. Next time, call for backup.”

She rolls her eyes. “Yeah, I get it, Graham.”

He stands in front of her, his six-two frame towering over her, hands on his hips. He gives her his best cop-slash-friend face. “You could’ve been knocked unconscious. Neal Cassidy has a list of priors a mile long. You’re not a cop, and you were unarmed. Call me or David next time.” His face turns from stern to tender in an instant. “You mean a lot to us, not just as a skip tracer.”

That hits her where it hurts. “I’m sorry I upset you.” The people in this town are the only family she has.

“Apology accepted.” He turns around and waves to his deputy as he drives off. 

Emma waves, too. It must be Graham’s turn to scold her; otherwise David would stay and read her the riot act. She’s sure to have a few texts from Mary Margaret waiting for her when she gets to her phone. 

She looks at the clock on her phone as she sits down in the car. Sure enough, there are six unread text messages from her best friend. No doubt he informed her en route to the police station about how Emma Swan put her life in danger again chasing down another guy she spotted in a coffee shop.

It’s a quarter-to-six when she fires up the engine of her trusty old VW Beetle. If she hurries, she’ll have just enough time to get to the comic book store to grab today’s release of her favorite comic, _Moto Pirates._

She’s waited months for this moment. This comic releases every two months, with a special annual edition around Christmas. Her copy is already on hold, and she just has to get there to grab it. She can’t wait.

 

She settles down into her favorite booth in Granny’s diner, smiling to herself as she pulls the glossy pages out of the paper bag from Neverland Comics. She spies Killian Jones’ face on the cover, and her heart does a little flip in her chest. Now, here’s a man she’d never shy away from.

Yes, she’s twenty-six years old. Yes, she has a career and real furniture in her flat, but there’s just something about him that makes her feel sixteen again. Something in the steel glint of his eyes, that she’s only seen in black-and-white graphite pencil, that makes her wish a man like Captain Jones existed. 

Granny brings over a mug for her, filling it up. Emma barely notices, captivated by the balloons of text and drawings of men on motorcycles. 

“Your usual?” 

Emma nods, barely taking her eyes from the page as the story unfolds.

Killian Jones is a motorcycle street racer, captain of the exclusive team, HRI (short for Hook Racers International). He’s won several victories over his rival, Robert Gold (though the story always simply called him “Gold” and Alistair “Hyde”). In issue #13, it was revealed that the rivalry stemmed from Killian’s affair with Gold’s wife, Milah. Gold and his sidekick, Alistair Hyde, murdered her when he found out. 

In issue #18, Killian, an orphan and then up-and-coming racer, finds out the truth about the death of his love, and vows to avenge Milah’s death by stripping Gold of his title as champion motorcycle racer. His only sibling long dead, he’s forged on alone, tortured by memories of his lost love, drowning his sorrows in alcohol. He’s about to give up after a crushing defeat. That is, until he asks his best friend, Robin Locksley, to become his sidekick in issue #31, racing alongside him to victory after victory. 

That was where Emma came in. She’s not sure how she got so invested in this story, but it started when she was a teenager, tossed from group home to group home, that she found solace in a story about someone also abandoned in the world. She remembers when she first came across that same battered 31st issue in her drawer at a new group home, left behind by some other foster kid. She almost threw it away herself, but those sharp eyes under a racing helmet seemed to stare back at her, beckoning her. So, she opened the page and was hooked.

It was a form of escapism, really, so she started collecting _Moto Pirates_ , frequenting comic book stores everywhere she moved after that. She supposes it is a silly obsession of fangirling over some story that isn’t real, but now she feels attached to it after ten years, invested in the life of the main character. 

_Will he ever find love now that Milah has been gone so long? He talks about a woman far away, but she’s never featured in the story and Emma is sick of waiting for that storyline to develop._

_Will he ever go back to riding Michelin tires after that crash three years ago in issue #75? The one he got the scar on his cheek from?_

_Will Robin ever fully understand that the lighter 125s and 250s are all about burying the front of the bike into corners and using huge corner speed? Will he ever man up and propose to his girlfriend, Regina?_

This edition of _Moto Pirates_ is special, because this edition is the 100th, and it’s Gold’s final race before he’s retiring. Hyde will probably take over the team, nearly as vindictive and vicious as Gold, but this race, the Moto Grand Prix, is a big one. 

Her food sits untouched as the race heats up before her eyes. The racers clamor to the starting line and the gun goes off to start the race. Robin takes to the outside of the track as Killian goes into the inside early and a little bit more, using less speed in the corner and picking up his bike to accelerate. He changes the first part of the corner, his font tire pushing harder and harder into the turns. The next page cuts to Gold’s face, stark lines of determination, even as he loses grip and slides a little on his knee to the outside. 

Her thumbnail is a goner. She’s nibbling and twisting between her teeth, heart beating, and she swears as she turns the page, she can see the black-and-white images jump out at her, the close-up of Killian’s loaded tire gripping like a servo brake. Killian’s face in the next frame is fraught with urgency as the inset shows him digging deeper and going faster, urging him on into victory. She breathes a sigh of relief as he crosses the finish line, the dots and circles representing the crowd cheering him on. 

She swears she can hear it. Swears she can see the blue glint of his forget-me-not eyes looking up at her as his pit crew and Robin crowd around him. Perhaps the most unique feature of this particular comic book series (she’s tried, but can never really get into another one), is that when Killian wins his races, he always looks up from the book at the reader. It’s been a trademark since issue #32, when he won his first comeback race. She’s been to online forums, but nobody has ever discussed this particular attribute of _Moto Pirates._ She swears she’s going to go to a convention one of these days just to meet the (rumored) reclusive writer. 

As she’s staring at the final frame, she feels a strange tug, almost like the first second of déjà vu. In the black-and-white frame next to her fingers, Killian’s image appears to come to life, and he winks at her. 

_That can’t be real,_ she thinks, as she looks up and around the diner. It’s dark outside, the world around her having gone on like her hero wasn’t just in the race of his life against his arch-enemy. She feels like she’s in a dream, the lights of the diner dim and dreamlike. She looks back down at the comic book page and gives it a little shake, certain she’s just seen a holographic image. It is the 100th issue, after all. There might be some special effect. She’s wanted a color issue for ages. 

Nothing. _Weird,_ she thinks, as she peers back down at the page again. Her eyes stop over Killian’s face again, mesmerized. 

He raises an eyebrow. 

Emma jumps, eyes wide, as she looks again. Is that – is he – is he _waving_ at her?

But make no mistake, there’s a little drawn figure of the character in a story she’s fantasized about for a decade, and he’s smiling and beckoning for her to come closer. 

So, like any sane woman, she does.

The feeling could only be best described as those first terrifying seconds of a roller-coaster drop. Emma feels like she’s going to pee her pants and throw up all at the same time. She feels the air pressure drop, her body aches, and suddenly – 

Killian Jones, winner of the Moto Grand Prix, Captain of HRI, and object of her young adult fantasies, is standing in front of her, life-size. They’re separated by a large, black-and white, hand-drawn frame of some kind. 

Her heart beats wildly in her chest. 

He’s standing in front of her, _in color_ , smirking. He’s still wearing his race gear: motorcycle jacket, thin tee shirt, snug black pants. His drawings have never done him justice, she decides. He’s beautiful. Olive skin, dark eyebrows jutting out over the bluest eyes she’s ever seen, dark brown hair tousled by his hasty removal of his helmet…he’s more breathtaking than she’s ever imagined.

He licks his lips and she feels a jolt of desire. Oh, to be able to touch him. 

And then it occurs to her. 

She can.

_Can she?_

She reaches out her hand, and he mirrors her, the large frame echoing their movements to each other. She raises her hand up to see if it’s just an image or a figment of her imagination. 

There’s no barrier, just a soft ripple of something that feels like JELL-O, and then she’s feeling his fingers, running hers along his palm as he turns his hand to grip hers. Her eyes meet his through the frame, and his own face mirrors hers, intrigued and amazed. Everything around her is black-and-white comic book sketches, but the frame behind Killian is in full color. It looks like a room or a gallery he’s standing in. 

_What is this?_ She wonders. _Where is everyone else in the diner, in the story? Did I fall and hit my head that hard this afternoon? Am I going to wake up in the emergency room? Am I dead?_

As if he can read her thoughts, Killian bites his lip and gives her arm a tug, and she’s being pulled through (yep, that definitely feels like JELL-O) and she’s in his arms. 

“Hello, love.”

She takes a deep, shaky breath. Her eyes are about to pop out of her head. She’s touching a real-life Technicolor Killian Jones, not the resin model she got from Etsy that sits on her dresser, not the poster framed on her wall. This is a human being, warm and smelling of sweat and leather, breathing into her face, smiling at her. 

“How?” She looks down at them, in the same dimension, touching. It’s all so surreal, but it’s the most alive she’s ever felt in her entire life. It’s _him_ , the fictional character she’s been irrationally in love with since she was a teenager. 

She feels a little light-headed. 

“Does it really matter?” He cocks his head to the side. 

She’s heard his muddled English accent in her head for years, tried to fit real-life diction in movies or recordings to what she thought he would sound like, but it never came close to what she’s hearing now. His low timbre and lilt remind her of that first issue, reading about his Irish-born roots and moving to England as a young teenager, orphaned and alone after the loss of his brother Liam. 

“I guess not.” She smiles up at him, thrilled for whatever this is – magic or a near-death experience, or worse, a dream she’ll probably wake up from in a few minutes, trying desperately to go back to sleep to finish out.

 _(What neither of them realize is that this_ is _real, this magic, this crossing of realms. Although they live in the moment, only immersed in each other, the world around them goes on. Gold is hungry for revenge, sore from losing to Killian. Granny notices Emma’s uneaten food and unpaid bill. Furious, Gold begins to search for Killian among the crowd. Angry at being stiffed, Granny reaches down and crumples up Emma’s beloved comic book, tossing it in the garbage can behind the counter as she stalks back to the kitchen.)_

An odd creaking and groaning sound echoes around Emma and Killian, like metal being twisted and pulled apart. Killian tightens his grip on Emma, worriedly looking up to something behind her. 

_This is it,_ she thinks, _this is when my dream ends._

The sound stops. 

Suddenly, Gold appears on the other side of the frame, in black-and-white, where Emma stepped through. She looks back in time to see him lift up his hand. He’s holding a pipe wrench. He’s yelling something, but they can’t hear him. He strikes out with the pipe, hitting the frame. It may have felt like JELL-O, but it sounds like glass breaking. 

Panicked, she looks up at Killian, the sound of crashing drowning out her voice. “What do we do?!”

He looks down at her with a determined look on his face. She’s seen that look before, when he found out about Milah’s death and promised to take Gold down. 

“We run, Emma.” His eyes are full of fright and resolve. “I can’t lose you.”

“Lose me?” She shakes her head. “You just met me.”

“I’ll explain later.”

He grips her hand tighter and they break into a run. The window in the frame finally shatters as she looks back down the hallway, and Gold comes crashing through. They only have about ten yards of gain on him. She sprints ahead of Killian, the dark hallway looming. He takes the hint and speeds up as well. 

They turn a corner and run down some stairs. Gold seems far behind now, but when they open the door at the bottom of the stairwell, there’s only blue sky ahead of them and nothing below them. 

“Jump!” She yells, courage coming from nowhere, and they do. They fall through clouds, listening to what sounds distinctly like engines roaring below them. That rollercoaster feeling is back, and she’s pretty sure she’s dreaming now, since the feeling is nowhere near as frightening as she thought it would be. 

They land on Killian’s bike, and just like that, he’s back in the race, in black-and-white, Gold and Hyde flanking him. Emma knows she should be scared as hell (her heart is definitely pounding at the abrupt change of events), but she merely clings to Killian as he maneuvers them through the race. She chances a glimpse down to her red leather jacket, only to find that she’s just as monochrome as the rest of the characters around her. 

_This is one hell of a weird, amazing dream,_ she thinks to herself. 

The landscape around them changes, no longer the race track from the story, but twisted somehow. Even the sky looks like someone pulled and coiled it up. Almost like crumpled up paper. A brief image of herself balling up a junk mail flyer comes to her mind. The edges are odd geometric shapes, folding into each other. She cranes her neck to see around Killiian, and the road ends in front of them, dark and narrow. 

Killian brakes, sliding the bike into the narrowing space. They land on their side, and for a brief moment, Emma wonders if she’ll have road rash before she decides this is most definitely a dream. They’re off the bike and running, Gold and Hyde and his crew running behind them.

 _How did they get off of their bikes so fast?_ she wonders, before the hallway abruptly ends at a smaller version of the frame she came in from. She looks behind them to see the group of men closing in.

“Emma.” 

She turns around to look at him, frantic and wide-eyed. Dream or no dream, this is the most real thing she’s felt all of her life, what she feels in this moment. All of those years of one-night-stands, running from men, running from love, have brought her nothing but longing and pain. If there’s one desperate wish she has right now, it’s that she really is dead, or she’s in a coma and she’ll never wake up. Because when she looks at Killian’s face, his _real_ face, she knows she’ll never feel for a real man as much as she feels for him. 

“Don’t do this, Killian.” She reaches out and cups his jaw, running her fingernails through his scruff. “Don’t send me back. Let me stay. What will happen to you? There’s so much we haven’t –“ 

“Shh.” He silences her with his finger on her lips. “I know we haven’t. There’s so much I need to explain, but you must go. You’re not safe here. I’m sorry.” His voice is urgent and pleading. 

The darkness of the henchmen behind them seemed to be held at bay by some invisible force. Gold raised the pipe wrench, threatening. There was nowhere left for them to go. 

“It’s no better to be safe than sorry.” She rubs her finger over his lips and breathes his name. 

“You don’t have to worry about me, love.” He folds her into his embrace. “If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s surviving.” 

“I meant me.” Emma clutches the lapels of his jacket. “I’d rather be in danger with you than safe out there.”

“Darling,” Killian’s voice rumbles under her ear, “I promise I will find you, but I need you safe.” His voice breaks on the last word, like she’s something precious and cherished. 

How? How can this man make her feel more loved in a few minutes than she has in her entire life?

Face buried in his chest, she mouths the words she’s been scared to say her whole life. She breathes in his scent one last time before she turns toward the window and he’s helping her to crawl through. 

The last thing she sees is his black-and-white face staring back at her with longing. 

Expecting the dream to end gradually, she’s shocked to blink and find herself next to a small trash bin. Disoriented, she looks up to find Granny standing over her with a look of shock on her face, a group of diner employees behind her. She looks around, and, sure enough, she’s on the floor of the diner behind the counter. She’s sore all over, clutching a clump of paper, and she looks over at her hand buried in the trash bin around the crumpled comic book. 

Crumpled. Coiled. Stairs that end in sky. Gold appearing out of nowhere. The dark menacing crowd just beyond an invisible shield. 

Holy frickin’ crow. 

That was no dream. 

She stands abrubtly, still grasping the comic book, and runs over to the booth she occupied earlier and grabs her purse. Fumbling, she holds the paper between her lips as she unfolds a twenty dollar bill and slaps it down on the table (now empty), before darting out the door. She peels out of the parking lot, breaking every traffic law known to Storybrooke as she races home. She ruefully thinks that Killian would be proud of her racing skills, before she squeals into a parking space outside her building and jerks the parking brake up. The car shudders as she cuts the engine, and she barely closes the door before she’s tearing off to her flat. 

Ever so gingerly, she flattens the comic book against her desk and opens it. She immediately notices the story has changed to include her. It’s quite jarring to see her colorless visage on the page and she feels like she’s a part of the story. She quickly flips to the end of the book, shaken to see that events carried on after she left the story through the frame. It looks like Killian tried to fend off Gold and Hyde and their crew, getting a few good punches in, but he was outnumbered, and the crew held him fast while Gold did the beating. The juxtaposed frame illustrates a battered, bruised Killian Jones lying on the ground. 

Is he dead? Hurt? How can she get to him now? 

She leans closer to the page, hoping to see some sort of movement, but it changes in the blink of an eye, and there’s Killian, in the middle frame of the page, smacking on the edges above and around him. He’s literally moving, and she can hear him now.

But the sound is coming from behind her.

She whirls around, only to see him hitting the walls of her hallway, a drawing of black-and-white slamming himself against the walls. It’s too much for her to take, whatever this magic is that’s brought him here. He’s already in pain, and now he’s _here_ , in her apartment, and he’s – 

He’s switching abruptly back and forth, from black-and-white to color and back again, like an old TV image that wouldn’t come in. There’s even black-and-white static over his form, like he’s struggling to come in real-time. 

Emma bites her lip, wishing there was some way she could help him, something she could do, when suddenly, he smashes himself hard against the wall, hard enough to knock the _Moto Pirates_ poster down. It crashes to the floor just as he comes into full color. 

He’s breathing heavily, and he looks up at her, smiling. He’s never smiled like this, not in the entire time she’s known him.

_Known him, Emma?_

Yes, she answers. She knows him. She’s followed his story, known him for ten years, this narrated lover who she feels more connected to than any other man she’s ever met. 

And somehow, as he looks into her eyes and walks slowly toward her, she feels known by him. 

“How did you get here?” She feels the echo of the question she asked earlier. “I need to know.”

“I will always find you, Emma.” He’s sweaty and still out of breath as he stands in front of her. “I found you nearly a decade ago, in that group home in Boston. I found you in every story after, every moment you read about me you were a part of.”

“You found me?”

“Aye,” He takes a deep breath, smile splitting his face. 

“Wow.” She felt a little tingly all over, like she was seeing a UFO or a ghost for the first time. Something she might believe exists, but seeing it face-to-face is believing and she’s waiting for her whole mind to catch up.

“Not a day went by that I didn’t think of you, and when I’ve seen you staring back at me through the frame, well, you’re stunning.”

“But Milah, she –“ 

“I loved her very much, but she’s gone.” He looks down at his hand as it moves to take hers, fingers intertwining. “I didn’t think I’d be capable of loving anyone else, until I met you.”

 _He loves her?_ He loves her. “When did you meet me?”

“Issue number thirty-one, when you pulled me from your bureau drawer.”

“I was sixteen then.” She smiles, thinking of that day.

He looks up, furrowing his brow, contemplating. “That would make you twenty-six now, then?” He purses his lips.

“Yeah. How’d you know that?” She moves closer, running her free hand over his jacket lapel and the chest hair she can see peeking out over his v-neck shirt. “Does time work the same way for you?” 

“It does.” He nods and looks down at her, tilting his head, hinting, drawing closer. “I decided that day ten years ago that I wanted – I wanted to be a better man for you.”

“But what about Gold? Your revenge?” She shook her head and drew back an inch. 

Killian closes his eyes and sighs. “Forgive me, love, but I did still want my revenge, until today, when I pulled you into my world.”

“What changed?”

“I didn’t want you to be a part of that – “ he gestures with his free hand, “that story of revenge and heartache. I wanted a happy ending for once, and I knew a written story wouldn’t give me that, so I came here.”

“And what’s that?” She moves closer. “Your happy ending?”

“It’s you,” He whispers. He holds her there, piercing eyes and somber face. He swallows. “I want you.”

“I want you, too.” Her eyes are wide. This is so unreal, so crazy, so insane and she’s sure she’ll be hauled off for a psych evaluation now. Graham and David and Mary Margaret will have her committed to the nearest hospital, Klonopin and Zoloft her replacement for the figment of her imagination in front of her. 

But, oh, he feels so real when he steps into her, wraps his arms around her and weaves his fingers through her hair. His lips capture hers and she catches a swift glimpse of his beard before she feels it bristling gently against her nose and her chin. Two-dimensions never prepared her for what it felt like to feel his soft lips touching hers, his mouth opening a fraction to nudge hers open so he can brush his tongue against hers. The only things she can hear are the soft sighs and the beating of her heart. His own heartbeat is strong against her chest as she wraps her arms around his neck and slides her fingers through his hair. 

They fall asleep together that night, tangled limbs and floral sheets, and when she wakes up the next morning, she’s surprised to find him still there. He blinks up at her as he wipes the sleep out of his eyes and smiles. 

“How old are you, Killian?” She wonders aloud.

“Thirty-three.” 

She reaches out to run her fingers over his skin. _Real._

“So it wasn’t a dream?” She looks down at him in wonder.

Killian brushes the back of his knuckles over her cheek. “It was never a dream.”

**Author's Note:**

> My first fic for CS AU Week. I wasn’t sure if this was entirely a crossover, but I figured it was good enough. Anyway, 80’s MTV babies will remember the smash hit “Take On Me” by A-Ha (it came out in the mid-eighties). I LOVE this video, it's my favorite music video of all time, and I’m pretty sure these two were my original OTP. 
> 
> You can find the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djV11Xbc914   
> (and I recommend watching it because it’s 80’s awesomeness) 
> 
> and the original set of Killian’s eyes by the fabulous flipperbrain on tumblr here: http://flipperbrain.tumblr.com/post/147052523536/bedroom-eyes   
> (this was the original muse for my fic idea, thanks for being such a hella good fangirl artist). 
> 
> Also, I just couldn’t let Motorcycle!Killian go, okay? He’s hot!


End file.
